When Tamar Adler decided to hand-make hot dogs for a summer wedding party, she had no idea what she was getting herself into.

Jesse had dark pink cheeks and on cold days wore a brown skullcap. He wasn’t a crush or an idol—I now realize I don’t even know how to spell his name. I never saw it written, and when I last saw him, I was twelve and didn’t think of such things. Jesse stood on a dim stretch of Central Avenue in White Plains, New York, selling perfect and peppery hot dogs. My father visited regularly and brought me along on Saturdays—in my favorite pinafore and patent leather shoes—on our drive home to Westchester from concerts at Carnegie Hall. Jesse and my father would exchange pleasantries. Jesse would hand us three hot dogs wrapped in thin napkins, steam rising from them, and we would bend over our lunches, careful to keep mustard off our nice shoes. Eventually my younger brother, John, joined us. Eventually I spent Saturdays with my friends. Eventually everyone outgrew everything, and I never caught sight of Jesse again.

Jesse’s hot dogs came to mind when planning started for a party this summer celebrating my wedding. There would be a lunch of lobster and mussels by the sea. Then we wanted hot dogs for a late-night meal. And with both my father and Jesse long gone, what I really wanted, I heard through a quiet corridor of my inner self, was for those hot dogs to be like Jesse’s.

From an emotional perspective it was a good plan. From a practical one, it was complicated. I had no way of asking Jesse about the hot dogs he served from his roadside cart. I imagine they came in industrial packages from an anonymous factory—though I can’t say. So much about hot dogs is opaque that when I think about the breed of affection we have for them, it strikes me as the dysfunctional one we reserve for foods and friends about which we say things like I don’t even want to know.

Then an idea: What if I were to decide, in the spirit of my age, to Make My Own? Which led to another question—one I had somehow never asked: What, precisely, is a hot dog?

A definition comes from Bruce Kraig, professor emeritus of history at Roosevelt University, in his slim but comprehensive Hot Dog: A Global History: “a product encased in an animal gut, or an artificial facsimile.” It was probably born during the Upper Paleolithic as chopped meat or blood in a skin or bladder or intestine, then evolved over eons into ground meat in intestines of sheep or pig. It is emulsified (meaning blended) and of recognizable width and length. Most obviously (though I’d never considered it before), hot dogs are already cooked: Cooking a hot dog at home means heating it up.

Frankfurt and Vienna both claim the hot dog. The German and Austrian sausages from which it was descended, probably in the sort of cross-breeding and confluences that make a thing American, include the frankfurter, the wienerwurst, and the most straight-backed-sounding of the bunch, the thuringer. According to Kraig, there are two modern categories: the Oscar Mayer type, of which around 18.5 million a year are served at ballparks, made of mechanically separated turkey, chicken, and pork, plus water, salt, and assorted spices and preservatives. These generally have no casing and are disconcertingly innocuous. The second kind is the category I like: all-beef hot dogs, which are just over two-thirds beef, with the remainder a combination of beef fat and water and spices, in snappy casings.

Now to find someone who can show me how to make one. Over several weeks grilling on my rooftop I taste dozens from store shelves—and find myself liking Applegate organic-beef hot dogs, feeling ambivalent but generally positive about Nature’s Rancher ones, and truly loving Pat LaFrieda’s Black Angus hot dogs, which as far as I can tell must be bought at the rare specialty store or ordered and delivered by mail in a large cardboard box. (I don’t dip into the Hebrew National and Vienna Beef well; details about the animals they’re made from, other than that they are cattle, are too difficult to determine for my taste.) All are produced on a large scale, and standing in a cold factory or processing plant, wearing a paper shower cap and watching similarly dressed people hoist ground beef in and out of machines, doesn’t match my bespoke–hot dog fantasy.

I call Daniel Boulud. At his DBGB Kitchen and Bar on Bowery, the celebrated French chef serves a hot dog made by Aurélien Dufour, a fourth-generation charcutier trained in Paris. Daniel invites me to watch Dufour at work.

I arrive on a warm day. Daniel emerges from a silver chauffeured car, already in chefs’ whites, talking on a Bluetooth earpiece at a full trot. He kisses me hello, and then we hurry into the charcuterie room. There we stand beside the tall, bony-wristed Aurélien, who begins, the moment we arrive, to add deep-red ground meat and fat into a 2,000-rpm German mixer—a gleaming, terrifying robotic machine with a menacing blade and a bright-red dial. It churns, immensely and silently, as Daniel adds milk, ice water, then a combination of juniper, clove, allspice, onion and garlic powders, paprika, and pink curing salt. Aurélien mostly oversees, answering Daniel’s calls of En avant? with Oui. One can see into the machine through a helpful peephole on top.

When the spiced beef has the consistency of a very smooth batter, Daniel clicks the red dial, then tastes some on a fingertip, encouraging me to do the same. The smell is familiar and appealing. “Like tartare!” he says. It is—a fine, highly spiced tartare I would happily eat on pommes gauffrettes. Daniel transfers the mixture quickly to a large steel canister with a hydraulic lid that descends at the touch of a button. On its side is a metal tube onto which Aurélien, his long fingers moving like a pianist’s, feeds sheep casings. At the touch of another button the mix is pressed into the casings, which, full, are moved to a second table where Aurélien deftly swings long ropes, tying neat identical hot dogs, his agile wrists making it all seem a pretty quadrille. The links proceed to a box smoker with mesquite and cherry-wood chips. They will stay there for more than four hours, until they have what Daniel charmingly calls kgnack (“snap”). The following stages have been set up in advance and are so carefully orchestrated that I feel the seamless calm of a cooking-show set. Smoked hot dogs go into a pot of simmering water, tinted yellow by turmeric to add color. Out of the water, they are shuttled next door into the DBGB kitchen and a waiting griddle.

Daniel spoons onion confit into two long, brioche-like buns, made in his bakery, just beside the charcuterie room. On top go griddled hot dogs, then a relish of fermented chilies and cabbage. Then what he calls a crudité of radish and frisée. (“I have to use frisée; I’m French!” he explains, unprompted.) Over it all goes his Bastard Sauce: ketchup, mayonnaise, horseradish. When asked what inspired this combination of toppings, Daniel replies, “It is an orgasm à l’américaine!”

Underneath the orgasm is a hot dog that is subtle, delicately smoky, and lovely—a beautifully made artisanal sausage bearing resemblance to the emulsified charcuterie of Alsace, which Daniel cites as its Gallic relative. But the fact that its artisans are French, and wearing the mantles of family tradition and Michelin stars, means (in an unavoidable pun) that what I have learned is how to make not a Jesse-style American hot dog but an haute dog.

I turn to my brother, John, the Blue Hill and Per Se–trained chef of the small, seasonal Franny’s in Brooklyn. He does not serve hot dogs at his restaurant. But he makes salumi by hand, has a meat grinder and a sausage stuffer, and knows all there is to know about any animal that goes into them.

He’s game to help and says that his New Jersey–bred sous-chef, Andrew Mumma, will pitch in. John is convinced that Jesse served an extinct variety of a Sabrett (all-beef) hot dog and offers to work with Andrew to reverse engineer it.

When days later I appear in Franny’s tiny prep kitchen and don an apron, I find myself immediately persuaded by the sight of tattooed, barrel-chested John and Andrew—who have already studied the plastic packages of hot dogs, and various salumi and charcuterie books. They decide we must start with deep vermilion slabs of beef from cattle raised on grass by Mennonites, blocks of snowy-white beef fat, salt-packed casings from sheep, and whole local onions and garlic to be dehydrated and ground into onion and garlic powders. The only ingredients they haven’t gotten back to their purest forms are black pepper, paprika, and Espelette pepper—“We don’t grow them here,” my brother explains—and salt and curing salt (for which I’m silently grateful, envisioning my brother and me in waders, floating buckets and sieves through the Coney Island surf).

In the absence of DBGB’s great German machines, we plan to use the petite grinder in the corner and a medieval-looking hand-cranked sausage stuffer. Instead of using an indoor smoke box, we will taxi our finished hot dogs to Hometown Bar-B-Que in nearby Red Hook, where they will sit over local oak.

Andrew has written our recipe in a notebook. I look it over as he gathers cutting boards and scales. It seems impossible that it contains all the contents of an authentic dog. It lists only ten ingredients—fewer than Daniel and Aurélien’s. And theirs had tasted rarefied.

In a moment of perverse paradox, instead of an apprehension that a hot dog’s contents are anonymous and potentially toxic, I have worries ours will be too pure. I can see that what John and Andrew have assembled would produce an exquisite daube de boeuf. I just can’t tell if it will make a hot dog.

I keep my concerns to myself, as one does faced with 50 pounds of beef and a mile of sheep intestine. John and Andrew and I, holding butcher knives, clean and cube and freeze and grind and freeze and grind and freeze and weigh and grind and turn the Gothic crank. I feel several times a bond with Paleolithic wurst-masters who probably used similar technology. Our artisanal grinder stutters; the vintage stuffer can’t handle the smooth tartare; even our casings tear. It is an epic best collapsed into an ellipsis . . . three days later, we have 300 hot dogs, stuffed and linked and waiting for a ride to Red Hook and time with oak smoke under the stars.

I do rough math. A package of eight of ours would, accounting for only labor and ingredients, cost around $100. Without having tasted our handiwork, I can say that from a populist perspective, even if the best possible ingredients make sense, hot dogs without industrial machines don’t. Their fine texture is terribly hard for any but behemoth grinders to achieve without exhaustion. In order for the delicate sheep casings to stay flexible, they need to be filled smoothly at the press of a button. The hot dog qua hot dog may be German or Austrian, but its second parent is the industrial age. It need not be bad for you, or bad for animals or for the environment. But it is by necessity the product and handmaiden of an industrial assembly line.

At Hometown Bar-B-Que, long braids of hot dogs are laid on smoky racks. We sit by a fire pit, and I think blearily as we wait that even if ours are nothing like those I used to eat with my father, the quixotic pursuit itself is better homage to a man who once bought an antique fire engine, and spent a summer in Maine raising a baby raccoon, than a perfect replica of his favorite hot dog ever could be.

At 2:00 a.m., pit master Mike declares our hot dogs ready. He moves them into waiting tubs. He very kindly hands me a knife. Suddenly nervous, I cut several burning links off one of the braids, lay them on a wooden table, and hand them around to be tasted.

We have made a hot dog. It is wonderful, salty, peppery, as long and thin and snappy as the ones I remember. I am certain no other one has ever been so meticulously sourced, laboriously and lovingly ground and mixed and stuffed and braided and smoked. I imagine our guests standing beneath the wide Maine sky, eating something that seems now a perfect symbol of the occasion. Is it Jesse’s hot dog? No. That remains where it belongs—in the place populated entirely by what-no-longer-is, along with my beloved pinafore and patent leather Mary Janes, and along with my father and with Jesse.